Thursday, August 28, 2014

the parody of socialism in France

The debacle of the French socialist party – which seems well
on its way to achieving a place in the museum of extinct parties, next to the
Frei Democratische party in Germany – can be explained, in large part, as a
phenomenon of the class struggle.

Class struggle! Haven’t we all gone beyond that since Reagan
and Thatcher freed the free world?

Well, one would think so as class becomes the absent
category in sociology and theory. But its sinking into the collective
unconscious doesn’t make it any less so.

The postwar years, from the late forties to the early
eighties, saw an almost Hegelian progression: the wage class and its unions
triumphed in the construction of the welfare state all over the developed
world. That very triumph, however, produced the children who buried the wage
class – the technocrats and meritocrats whose natural sympathies were for
Capital, not Labor. They looked like business execs and they thought like
business execs, and if they climbed through the channels of the Socialist Part (or
the SPD or the Labour party), they had no sympathy or understanding for the
culture and existences of the wage class. However, in the class system, certain
kinds are spinkled at random in the top and the bottom: especially women and
gays. In that respect, these technocrats did liquidate that old lefty
puritanism and patriarchal attitudes. What was never sprinkled at random in the
top was, of course, Africans or arabs, and one notices that they are still not
sprinkled in any ratio to their population through the top no matter what
flavor the government is.

The
triumph of the technocrat type meant, long ago, that the Socialist party,
founded as the party of the workers, was progressively hollowing out. The
parody of a socialist party that now rules France, with a neo-conservative
foreign policy, a neo-liberal economic policy, and a dog-whistle social policy
(see the Nouvelle Obs for the story of how the PS muckety mucks are usingNajat Vallaud-Belkacem http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20140827.OBS7342/quand-hollande-fait-croasser-la-droite-boutin.html
as a dogwhistle to the left, the way George Bush used to appoint evangelicals
as a sucker call to the right) will, I assume, come in behind the FN and the
UMP in 2017, when, if Hollande’s austerity policies are put in place,
unemployment should be reaching around 15 percent – it worked so well for
Spain, why not try it for France! The meritocrats who read their Mankiew, their
Chicago school economists, and have long ago replaced Marx with Hayek, will not
be touched by the unemployment – there is always more room in investment
banking for the meritocratic-lings, their darling daughters and sons. Magic
Fabius money for everyone! Interestingly, it will be the FN that will surely present
a more leftist economic platform, or at least a dirigiste one, and I expect
even the UPM will show some concern for the unemployed, rather than basking in
the glow of MEDEF.

It is hard to imagine
France without a left, but apparently this is what is happening. We have to
call the European project a complete success in that regard – reinstating the
gold standard in the form of the Euro, it was the product and generator of the
unbounded rule of speculative capital. You can try to vote against that rule:
you will fail.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.